Thousands of merchants offer products for sale via the Internet through stores that are presented to consumers on websites, mobile websites, mobile applications, and other electronically-connected purchase environments. Many of these online stores, also known as electronic commerce platforms or e-commerce sites, offer discounts to consumers who enter a specific code into a form box while shopping and/or consumers who follow a specially-formatted hyperlink or perform some other action(s) that activate a discount. These codes may be called “coupon codes,” “promotional codes,” “discount codes,” and many other terms. For the purpose of clarity, the term “codes” as used herein will include any action(s) taken by a consumer to access a different price for some or all of the items the consumer is considering purchasing.
Codes frequently offer perks such as free/discounted shipping or a lower price on an entire basket of products, a specific product category, a specific product, a certain number of products, products above or below a certain value, or even products that meet some combination of these and other criteria. In some cases, these codes are advertised to consumers during the online shopping experience; however, these codes are often hidden from many consumers and only known to those consumers who have been exposed to the codes through other channels (e.g., online advertisements, television advertisements, email correspondence).
Code Aggregators have created websites to help consumers locate available codes. More specifically, Code Aggregators aggregate codes and make the codes more readily searchable and discoverable by consumers by posting the codes to a website. These websites often provide search tools that allow consumers to filter codes by merchant, geographical location, etc. Several Code Aggregators have developed plug-in software components (also referred to as simply a “plug-in”) for web browsers that allow consumers to browse codes while shopping on merchant websites.
However, in order to use codes discovered by a Code Aggregator, a consumer must manually identify a promising code, copy the promising code into a form box presented on the merchant website (e.g., by typing a series of alphanumeric characters), and then submit the promising code (e.g., by clicking a form button labeled “Apply” or “Submit”) to discover a result.
While Code Aggregators may make their best effort to keep the list of codes posted to a website (as well as information describing the expected behavior/outcome of each code) accurate and up-to-date, consumers frequently and inadvertently attempt to use codes that no longer work, or simply do not work as described on the website of the Code Aggregator. To compound the problem, the total number of codes made available on the web site of a Code Aggregator is often very high (e.g., on the order of hundreds or thousands), thereby making it difficult for a single consumer to identify working codes, much less the most relevant code that would result in the best outcome (i.e., the largest discount).
Consequently, most consumers do not comprehensively test all of the codes that are available for a given electronic commerce platform in order to identify the optimal outcome. For example, a consumer may try inputting codes for a leading domain name merchant that have been posted to the website of a leading Code Aggregator. However, the consumer is unlikely to continue inputting codes until reaching the 18th code (which might not have any description on what the consumer should expect), which results in the largest savings—a price of $3.13 for a product that previously cost $14.17—a 78% savings. This experience is not uncommon. In fact, such experiences are becoming more commonplace with the proliferation of Code Aggregators who each seek to have the largest library of codes.